Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

association of states” and could not be “annulled at the pleasure of any one of the contracting parties,” much less because “the election of any one of our fellow-citizens to the office of President” turns out opposite to their inclinations. If so, the Union was indeed “a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States.” Secession “is wholly inconsistent with the history as well as the character of the Federal Constitution,” and therefore what the Southerners were calling secession “is neither more nor less than revolution.” At the same time, he was inclined to excuse the secessionists because of “the long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery”; anyway, he was certain that the Constitution gave him no authority as president to “coerce a State into submission” and back into the Union. The Union “rests upon public opinion,” and if “it can not live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.”78 As the weeks of his unhappy administration ran out, Buchanan sank further and further into political paralysis, desperately hoping that a crisis could be delayed long enough for him to retire gracefully and turn the government and its problems over to Lincoln.

Unfortunately for Buchanan, neither the newly triumphant Republicans in the North nor the secessionist fire-eaters in the South were willing to grant him a quiet exit. The Republicans, and especially Lincoln, refused to believe that Southern secession meant anything more than all the other temper tantrums the South had thrown since the Missouri Compromise. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, in a speech to the Senate on January 25, 1860, had heaped contempt on the secession threats as “this DISUNION FARCE,” which was intended only to “startle and appall the timid, make the servility of the servile still more abject, rouse the selfish instincts of that nerveless conservatism which has ever opposed every useful reform, and wailed over every rotten institution as it fell.” Lincoln himself was confidently predicting “that things have reached their worst point in the South, and they are likely to mend in the future.” Part of Lincoln’s peculiar confidence was due to his own overweening certainty that, as a born Kentuckian, he possessed a special insight into and empathy with Southerners. Possessed with this insight, he was sure that Unionism was a far more powerful force in the long run than the apparently illogical rush to secession.79

Lincoln was not the only Republican floating on a bubble of confidence. “We shall keep the border states,” predicted William H. Seward in February, “and in three months or thereabouts, if we hold off, the Unionists and Disunionists will have their hands on each other’s throats in the cotton states.” William S. Thayer, the assistant editor of the New York Evening Post, noted that “the leading Republicans” were all convinced that “the seceders had no purpose of remaining out of the Union.”80 It was also clear to the Republicans that a stout refusal to yield to Southern threats or accommodate Southern demands was politically useful. The Southern threat of secession gave the Republicans an important issue on which to rally Northern public opinion, even while the threats of disunion divided hesitant Southerners.

Consequently, neither Lincoln nor the Republicans were going to be at all receptive when Buchanan pleaded for compromises to placate the secessionists and keep the Union together. In his December 3 message to Congress, Buchanan had called upon Congress to work out a series of compromises that would take the wind out of the secession-mongers’ sails, including a constitutional convention that would consider an amendment to protect slavery in the territories and the purchase of the Spanish colony of Cuba in order to admit it to the Union as a slave state. These proposals were hardly the sort to please either Northern Democrats or Republicans, but they might have forced the secessionists to back down long enough to let the storm over Lincoln’s election die down. Similarly, a constitutional convention might have been just the instrument to reawaken national interest and loyalty in the South. Congress grudgingly formed two committees, one each for the House and Senate, to discuss Buchanan’s proposals for compromise, and by the end of December the Senate Committee was ready to put forth a compromise proposal that had been drafted by John J. Crittenden of Kentucky.81

The Crittenden Compromise actually called for not one but a series of constitutional amendments that guaranteed the following: the old Missouri Compromise line of 36°30′ would be revived and slavery would be forbidden in any state or territory north of the line and protected anywhere to the south; slavery in the District of Columbia was to be protected from congressional regulation; Congress would be prohibited from interfering in the interstate slave trade; and Congress would compensate any slave owner whose runaways were sheltered by local Northern courts or anti-slavery measures.

Crittenden seriously believed that his compromise could win popular support, and he even urged Congress to submit it to a national referendum. Lincoln, who refused to believe that the secession threats were finally serious, would have none of it. “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery,” Lincoln wrote on December 11. “The instant you do, they have us under again. … The tug has to come & better now than later.” At Lincoln’s cue, the Republicans in Congress gagged on Crittenden’s guarantees for the extension of slavery into the territories, and on January 16 they successfully killed Crittenden’s compromise on the floor of the Senate by a narrow margin, just five votes.82

In all fairness to Buchanan, the compromise plan had not necessarily been a bad idea in political terms, and in February a mostly Democratic “peace convention,” with delegates from twenty states and chaired by no one less than ex-president John Tyler, attempted to revive the Crittenden proposals. But Buchanan had lost the will and the political force that had enabled him